Here to Read the Future
by ariel2me
Summary: One-shot from Stannis' POV. Takes place during the "Davos reading the letter from the Wall" scene in A Storm of Swords.


"To the five kings. The king beyond the Wall comes south. He leads a vast host of wildlings. Lord Mormont sent a raven from the haunted forest. He is under attack. Other birds have come since, with no words. We fear Mormont slain with all his strength."

He heard the words as if they were coming from across the Narrow Sea. _My Onion Knight reads well_, a fleeting pride crossed his mind, before he remembered. _No, not my Onion Knight. The King's Hand, the man I raised to be a Lord and an Admiral, the man who betrayed me._ The hand clenching the sword was beginning to hurt, but the pain was a welcome distraction. _What did I mean to do with this? Take his remaining fingers? His head? _Anger makes fools out of men, his father had told him once, when he was still too young to understand. But he understood it all too well later.

Why is the man who betrayed him still here, in this room, calmly reading a letter? He could not understand that. Why did Davos not take Devan, gather his wife and two other sons, and slip away with Robert's bastard boy to safety? Far, far away from here.

_Away from me, and my wrath. Why come to me and confess to your betrayal? What is it that you think I would do? What if I decide to take your head this very moment? Or offer you to the Red God? Your wife, your children. Did you consider their fate?_ His anger mounted. _You presume too much. That I would forgive this betrayal because it was done by you._

The silence surprised him. Davos had finished reading. It is a short letter after all. He came out of his reverie and stared at his betrayer's face. He expected … well, he wasn't sure what he expected. What he saw unsettled him nonetheless. _I know this look, on this man's face. I have seen it before. The day I made him a knight, and took four of his fingers._

"A good act does not wash out the bad, nor a bad the good. Each deserves its own reward and punishment." That was what he had told the man who saved them from certain death. Because it is true. Because he believed it with all his heart, and still believes it to this day. Davos had met his gaze then with an indecipherable look. "Yes, sire. But only if you deliver the punishment yourself. With your own hand."

He had spent days trying to decipher that look, after the cleaver had done its job. _Was he challenging me? Testing my mettle and conviction?_ He thought he saw a glimmer of hope in that look as well. _The hope that I would turn out to be cowardly, and he could escape the punishment?_ _No, not that_, he thought. Not from this man. It was years later before he finally understood_. It was the hope that I would be a man worthy of his faith and loyalty._

And what did that look mean now? He knew the answer even before he finished asking the question. _The hope that his faith and loyalty, all these years later, had not been misplaced._

_You ask too much of me, my Onion Knight. My duty is to the kingdom, not to you._ Yet is that not what Davos was trying to remind him? His duty to the kingdom. "A king protects his people, or he is no king at all." Edric Storm is no longer the issue. The letter. The letter from the Wall Davos had just read. If the wildlings were to breach the Wall, who knew what calamities might befall the kingdom.

And what of the Great Other, the true enemy beyond the Wall? _The cold, and the night that never ends_, Melisandre had said. And it is not just her words he is thinking of. _I have seen it in the fire myself, with my own eyes. _Without the Wall, and the men protecting it, the battle would be lost before it even began.

A voice intruded. "Your Grace. A true king would protect the kingdom to win the throne."

"I _am_ the true king, the rightful king by all the laws of Westeros." He snapped back.

His Onion Knight hesitated. Finally he replied, "But you are a man of duty, Your Grace. Duty should come before rights."

He heard no trace of fear in Davos' voice. The moment of reckoning has arrived.

"We sail for Eastwatch-by-the-Sea in two days. The Black Brothers there will take us to the Wall through the ranger's roads."


End file.
